Neruda's career as a poet began with love poetry and ended with love poetry. One of his very last works, written only days before his death, is "The End," a love poem to [his wife] Matilde. There were, of course, changes; there were deviations during the period of Residence on Earth, for example; there were turns and innovations during the period of political and epic poetry that began in the late thirties and culminated in 1950 with Canto General, but there was also a remarkable contin...

[Neruda] will keep on dying with the movement of our century and with us: a vast and profound death of incalculable significance, dying first here, later there, and then beyond; now in me and then in other men and women, without obvious rhythm, but really with the rhythm of the seasons, of the sea, the stars and the trees, through which he keeps growing, stretching, resting from his life, breathing at last all the atmosphere and all the earth, all of time, the components of his death…. I want to writ...

In relation to Neruda's previous public posture as a writer of the people, Estravagario seemed very individualistic, even frivolous in its self-indulgence. What is more, the frivolity was not unintentional. (p. 175) How is one to interpret this about-face, Neruda's sudden lack of solemnity regarding himself and his work? Only eight years before, in 1950, at the end of Canto general, he had piously willed his books to the poets of tomorrow…. Then, speaking as the collective voice of his ...

[In the poem "Ode to Bread," from his collection Elemental Odes,] Neruda wants to do with bread what Stevens did with his jar in Tennessee: to place it on a hill and let its presence tame the wilderness. The comparisons in the first stanza of the poem make it clear that he celebrates bread for being itself, not for being eaten. Making bread is a birth and a growing. Its shape suggests the birth of man, its growth the rebirth of spring, an "equinoctial terrestrial germination" (eq...

At the time of his death in Santiago in 1973, twelve days after the military coup, [Pablo Neruda] had just seen the fourth edition of his Obras completas through the press, he was nearing the completion of his memoirs (Confieso que he vivido), and was working on the last of eight volumes of new poetry [Larosa separado, Jardin de invierno, 2000, El corazón amarillo, Libro de las preguntas, Elegía, Defectos escogidos, and El mar y las campanas]. He had planned to publish these, along with his au...

this time it is clear to everybody who has ever heard of him that Neruda is a very great poet. It is the folly of Americans to assume that to say as much is to say that a man is a great man, worthy of worship, a relief to us in our frantic and temporary deaths.

In 1962, Pablo Neruda began to set down some autobiographical poems centered around his house in Isla Negra, Chile. He wrote just over a hundred before he finished; it is this book ["Isla Negra"] Alastair Reid has now translated elegantly. In some of the poems Neruda goes below the surface of life, with its poisoned flowers, snakes and waterfalls that he loves to describe, and talks of a mysterious "wicked King," who is allied with the terrifying jungle. It's not clear who...

What is most startling about Neruda, I think, when we compare him to Eliot or Dylan Thomas or Pound, is the great affection that accompanies his imagination. Neruda read his poetry for the first time in the U.S. in June of '66 at the Poetry Center in New York, and it was clear from that reading that his poetry is intended as a gift. When Eliot gave a reading, one had the feeling that the reading was a cultural experience, and that Eliot doubted very much if you were worth the trouble, but he'd...

[Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra, A Notebook, was] written during 1962–63, and consists of about 202 pages of meditative, autobiographical poems. He seems to have written them "as a present to himself for his sixtieth birthday" (as Professor E. M. Santi observes in his Afterword). In this "present to himself," Neruda contemplates the various periods of his life, dividing the lyrical series into 5 sections: Where the Rain is Born, The Moon in the Labyrinth, Cruel Fire, The...